Light circuits will make your computer communicate internally and externally much quicker–and they’ll be smaller to boot!

Computers will only move as fast as their digital organs can talk to each other via electric current. Now researchers are looking into a shorter-wavelength–and therefore faster–solution: using light to transmit information instead of electricity.

“If we moved to shorter wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum–like light–we could make things smaller, faster, and more efficient,” said University of Pennsylvania Professor Nader Engheta in 2012. The development of the light-controlling “metasurface” opens the door to transmission and processing of data inside chips using single photons (light particles) since conventional photonic devices cannot reduce the wavelength of light, which is naturally too large to fit in the tiny components needed for integrated circuits.

The Purdue scientists who developed the 30-nanometer wide “metasurface” shined a laser through it to project a hologram surface 10 microns above, displaying the word “Purdue” to a width of 100 microns–the width of a human hair.

Xingjie Ni, Birck Nanotechnology Center

Obviously, this has applications for digital and 3-D displays, especially with the hologram’s resolution of one-micron-wide letter strokes. But by simply tweaking the direction of the V-shaped nanoantennas that make up the metasurface, the researchers gained control over the intensity and phase/timing of light shined through the metasurface–which opens the door to bringing so-called “optical circuits” into operational use.